EvenForbes’ columnist Avik Roy is recanting. Earlier this month he acknowledged that under Obamacare, many Americans who buy their own coverage in 2014 will find that insurance is significantly more affordable than it was in the past: “Three states will see meaningful declines in rates: Colorado (34 percent), Ohio (30 percent), and New York (27 percent).”

Colorado, Ohio and New York are not unique. As states announce the prices that carriers will be charging in the online marketplaces (or “Exchanges”) where Americans who don’t have health benefits rate at work will be purchasing their own coverage, jaws are dropping. Rates are coming down, not only for those individuals, but for some small business owners who will be buying insurance for their employees in separate SHOP (Small Business Health Options Program) Exchanges.

What may be most surprising is that premiums will be lower, not only in liberal Blue states but in some Red states that are opposed to Obamacare.

The second reason premiums are significantly lower than expected is that as I have explained on healthinsurance.org in the state marketplaces insurers are forced to compete on price. All policies sold in the Exchanges must cover the same essential benefits, and follow other rules that will make the plans look very much alike. The only way for a carrier to distinguish himself from the crowd will be to charge less—or have a better network of providers. But the younger customers that carriers covet care far more about price than about the network.

Third, in many cases,state regulators have been clamping down. In Portland Oregon, for example, regulators forced insurers to cut their proposed rates by an average of nearly 10%. Three of the 12 insurance companies in that market had to lower their rates by more than 20% f

Below, a guest-post by Kev Coleman, Head of Research and Data at HealthPocket. His latest study comparing the costs of for-profit and non-profit plans can be found here .

Sometimes I groan after I complete a piece of research, knowing that the results may be seized and simplified by either end of the political spectrum .

Nevertheless, I went ahead and decided to compare premiums and out-of-pocket limits of nonprofit vs. for-profit health plans. This task is easier said than done. First, health plans vary with respect to their benefits and premium comparisons aren’t especially meaningful if there are significant disparities in covered medical services among plans. Consequently, I had to define a minimum set of benefits in order to get a decent representation of both nonprofit and for-profit plans that were similar to one another. Plans that didn’t meet the criteria weren’t included in the study.

Another problematic issue for premium comparisons is that there is a relationship between deductible amounts and monthly premiums: higher premiums often mean lower deductibles.. Comparing premiums between plans with wildly different deductible amounts isn’t fair. This issue led me to establish deductible ranges; comparisons between the plan types were performed only within those ranges.

Finally, there was the issue of location. Health insurance premiums are strongly influenced by region. This influence exerts itself on several fronts: state-specific insurance regulations that have to be satisfied; local level of competition in the market; and the medical claim trend for people living in the region. Accordingly, the premium comparisons were performed inside selected metropolitan regions and never between differing regions. Six cities were chosen as regions for premium comparisons, two from the east coast, two from the west, and two from the center of the country.

Results of the Study

The results? I found that in 47% of the comparisons a city’s nonprofit plans had the lowest average premium within a particular deductible range. For-profit health plans had the lowest premium in 39% of comparisons with the remaining 14% classified as ties since the differences between the nonprofit and for-profit averages were less than 3%.

An examination of out-of-pocket limits for these nonprofit and for-profit plans yielded similar results: Nonprofits had the lowest average limits on out-of-pocket costs in 56% of the comparisons. For-profit plans had the lowest average limits in just 28% of the comparisons.

What should we conclude based on these results? If you have strong political convictions, I can see several ways the data could be spun, particularly given the thorny issue of tax advantages that some nonprofit plans enjoy. For myself, I satisfy myself with a modest set of conclusions and let the politicos fight about the rest:

1) Nonprofit health plans are more likely to offer a lower premium than for-profit health plans

2) Removing a profit incentive from health plans as a means to make premiums more affordable cannot be supported by my study’s results since in over half the comparisons nonprofit health plans did not have the lowest premium

3) Nonprofit plans are more likely to have superior out-of-pocket cost protections than for-profit plans

It will be interesting to revisit the nonprofit/for-profit premium comparisons once the new Affordable Care Act plans are released. The Essential Health Benefits will effectively commoditize plans and health status will no longer be a factor in availability or price of coverage. As a result, so premium differences and provider networks could assume greater importance to consumers shopping for health insurance.

One of the issues not addressed in this study is the question of health plan quality (e.g. clinical outcomes, customer satisfaction, adherence to best practices, etc.). Health plans are more than premiums and the lowest cost plan might not be the wisest consumer choice if quality scores are unacceptably low. I plan on analyzing the same plans used in this study from the perspective of their quality scores to shed some light on the relationship of quality to the premium differences discovered.

Note from MM: — I am glad that Coleman ends by emphasizing that consumers need to consider quality as well as price. If insurance doesn’t protect you, it’s not worth the money, no matter how low the premiums.

As it happens, I began comparing the quality of non-profit vs. for-profit insurance plans a couple of weeks ago, and will be publishing a post on the topic in a few days. I’ll invite Coleman to come back and report on his results as well.

Prominent on the list of witnesses: “Douglas Holtz-Eakin.” Even before reading his testimony, I knew what Holtz-Eakin would say: young, health Americans should brace for “sticker shock.” Conservatives like Holtz-Eakin tend to stay on script. However stale the rhetoric, they firmly believe that if you repeat a sound-bite often enough, people will believe it.

Who is Douglas Holtz-Eakin?

If you recognize the name, it’s probably because Holtz-Eakin has become a familiar figure in the mainstream media, quoted in the New York Times, writing Op-eds for Reuters and Politico.com, and appearing, not only on Fox Business News, but on CNN and the PBS’ Newshour.

Alternatively, “Holtz-Eakin” may ring a bell because he served as a member of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), and as Director of Bush’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO.)

“Going into the summer of 2001, things were getting worse. . . When we first went in and talked to the President, Glenn [Hubbard] and Larry Lindsey said, ‘Mr. President . . . We’re probably not going to run a surplus on budget. We’re going to run a deficit.”

Bush’s reply: “We’re not going to run a deficit. If you come in here with a deficit, you’re both fired. Go fix it.’”

In the post, Jed Graham explains that when the IRS published a final rule about penalties under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it included a few hypotheticals. For example, the IRS wrote, “The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000′ in 2016.”

The $20,000 figure was just an example, Graham explains. “The IRS always uses hypothetical numerical examples in its regulations to illustrate how the rules will work in practice and this was no different.”

This is the problem: Once a faux-fact gets out there, even reporters who have no axe to grind continue to repeat it. If you see the number often enough, you assume it must be true.

How could a reporter tell that $20,000 wasn’t an IRS estimate?

It should have been clear that this was a hypothetical, Graham points out, if you just looked at other hypotheticals in the IRS ruling. “For example: ‘the annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 4 (1 adult, 3 children) is $18,000.’

“Both examples can’t be true,” he observes, “unless an adult’s premium is $2,000 and a child’s is $5,333.”Continue reading →

Even high-income families will save: thanks to rules that limit co-pays, and reward providers for becoming more efficient, “those earning $100,000 to $250,000” will spend $779 less on medical care.” But these are “averages.” They don’t tell you whether your health care costs will rise or fall.

The answer will depend on: your income, your age, your gender, who you work for, what state you live in, whether a past illness or injury has been labeled a “pre-existing condition,” and what type of insurance you have now:

Moreover, he will find insurance less expensive. Today, small businesses pay 18% more than large companies because the administrative costs of hand-selling plans to small groups are sky-high. But starting in 2014 businesses with fewer than 100 employees will begin buying insurance in “Exchanges” where they will become part of a large group, and eligible for lower rates.

Laszweski’s piece has been cross-posted on popular blogs, and his forecasts have been popping up in mainstream newspapers, including USA Today. Such wide circulation makes Laszewski’s warnings worthy of attention, and compels me to ask an important, if impertinent, question: Is what he saystrue?